Open Collections

Understanding web application test assertion failures

University of British Columbia

Developers often write test cases that assert the behaviour of a web application from an end-user’s perspective. However, when such test cases fail, it is difficult to relate the assertion failure to the faulty line of code. The challenges mainly stem from the existing disconnect between front-end test cases that assert the DOM and the application’s underlying JavaScript code. We propose an automated technique to help developers localize the fault related to a test failure. Through a combination of selective code instrumentation and dynamic backward slicing, our technique bridges the gap between test cases and program code. Through an interactive visualization, our approach, implemented in a tool called Camellia, allows developers to easily understand the dynamic behaviour of their application and its relation to the test cases. The results of our controlled experiment show that Camellia improves the fault localization accuracy of developers by a factor of two. Moreover, the implemented approach incurs a low performance overhead.

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2014-10-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/50814

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/